PEN President Resigns To Protest the Uncovering of Antisemitism

There’s quiet quitting and loud quitting, and post October 7, there’s also performative quitting. Performative quitting is like wearing ratty old jeans with a Birkin bag, a clear sign that you are both down-to-earth and can afford to leave a job with benefits without a backup plan.

Responding to a report of racism in your own profession by resignation can look like allyship, can look like diva behavior, or it can look like guilt. Certainly Dinaw Mengestu quitting PEN after a scathing report from his institution about antisemitism in publishing looks like the latter.

There’s always been performative activism linked to Gaza activism. A decade ago, it was all the rage to boycott SodaStream, which led to the closing of a West Bank factory and the loss of 500 high-paying jobs for those West Bank workers. The recent BDS victory at the Park Slope Co-op similarly impacts businesses that are Palestinian-owned. It’s always unfortunate when an earnest need for public action collides with a catastrophic dip in content knowledge. It’s always unfortunate because the public action never helps the victims of this conflict.

Performative quitting is rampant in the publishing industry. Within days of the Hamas October 7 terrorist murders, editor and stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson quit Vogue. Whether she was fired or forced to quit after her vicious attack on Israel, Karefa-Johnson untethered herself from Vogue. Don’t fret — she continues to fly first class (but complains about the white men who share the cabin) and styles Mayor Mamdani and his wife (NB there is no clear link between Karefa-Johnson and the sartorial butchery of the bootleg Knicks outfit the mayor’s wife wore to the parade).

Anne Boyer was the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine until her Gaza-adjacent public quit in November 2023 over her belief that the Times’ coverage was too pro-Israel. Perhaps Boyer will return now that the Times accused Israel of training dogs to rape humans? No word from Boyer, and no word from the poetry section at the Times, which has been dark since January 2024.

The latest performative public quitter, as of July 10, is PEN’s Mengestu. Mengestu served on the PEN Board for a decade and became its president seven months ago, when Suzanne Nossel was pushed out by anti-Israel activists. PEN (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) was founded in 1921 as an international advocacy group to protect writers and free expression. There are chapters of PEN worldwide, and PEN America holds readings, discussions, gives awards, and holds obligatory annual galas. When I worked in publishing in the 1990s, membership in PEN America allowed struggling writers to get health insurance. In recent years, PEN has become less about advocacy and more about activism. In today’s publishing world, the sole focus of activism seems to be Israel.

Other PEN members noticed. George Packer wrote memorably about it in a May 2024 Atlantic piece “PEN American and Authoritarian Spirit.” Longtime PEN member and advocate Packer argued that many writers and artists have abandoned the habits that make good writing valuable — curiosity, complexity, moral ambiguity, and empathy — in favor of ideological conformity and public declarations of political loyalty. Those who dissent or refuse to sign public statements (like Megenstu’s predecessor Nossel) risk professional or social punishment. This pressure leads to self-censorship and discourages genuine debate. Writers, Packer believes, are acting more like activists and less like writers.

Mengestu publicly, censoriously protested Packer on Instagram. Instead of embracing PEN’s cosmopolitan and inclusive international mission, he reduces it to a particularist Palestinian cri de coeur.

“It’s hard to overstate the degree to which this piece perverts and distorts the legitimate and necessary criticisms against Pen America, while at the same time reducing the horrific and ongoing massacre in Gaza to a cause that might be compelling. The writers who have refused to be a part of PEN America, to have their names and reputations affiliated with the organization have done so because they see the history of bias, the failure to support the very cause of free expression that PEN is supposed to champion but fails to do so when it comes to Palestinian lives. Rather than engage honestly with that bias this piece like so many others opts to turn that complex reality into an absurd claim for authoritarianism. PEN America’s political statements that span the globe are a part of its history and not some recent exception as this article.”

On July 9, 2026, PEN America released “A Silent Moratorium,” an investigative piece that detailed the withering response the publishing industry has had towards Israeli writers and Jews in general since October 7. It’s a comprehensive and fully sourced piece, full of the exact kind of discrimination and censorship that PEN has fought against since its founding more than a century ago.

Anti-Israel bias is the only permissible stance in publishing today but the subject of the bias is not limited to people who are responsible for the policies of the state in the Levant. The investigation shows how political activism provides cover for pernicious anti-Jewish prejudice. Literary agents, scouts, and authors give a scathing account of the bias towards not only Israeli but Jewish writers who do not disavow their religion or Israel. Karefa-Johnson’s BFF in Jew hate, Thomas Gebremedhin, remains an executive editor at Doubleday despite his antisemitic — even anti-human — Instagram post suggesting that a murdered Jewish-American woman “Rest in Piss.”

Gebremedhin’s latest release is a reissue of Beirut Fragments, a love letter to the PLO written by Jean Said Makdisi, sister of Edward Said, and editor of My Life in the PLO: The Inside Story of the Palestinian Struggle by one of the PLO founders, Shafiq Al-Hout. It’s been barely 41 years since the PLO hijacked the Italian ocean liner MS Achille Lauro, taking the crew and passengers hostage and shooting wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer for the sin of being Jewish. They then threw the dead body of the U.S. Army veteran off the Achille Lauro, still strapped into his wheelchair. But discriminating against American Jews is apparently OK again.

At least that’s what the PEN report shows. The overt hostility towards Jewish writers that the PEN reporters uncovered should have been a rallying cry for the leadership of PEN: an institution specifically mandated to protect writers from persecution and prejudice. In The Atlantic, Gal Beckerman reported the story out and noted that Mengestu’s resignation meant that in “setting aside the question of defending free expression for Israeli and Jewish writers, he focused on the rights of pro-Palestinian activists.” Mengestu ignored the very real censorship of Jewish authors by choosing the political activism, and refusing to represent the rights of writers of every single other country on Earth.

Twenty years ago, Iranian refugee Marjane Satrapi, a fervent PEN member, told The Believer in an interview about the Middle East: “Now my job is to defend everybody. But I don’t mind. Because I travel, and I like to talk to people and really listen to them. And I have no prejudices. I figured out a long time ago that, whatever I think I know, I don’t know anything. Once I realized that, I really started learning.”

It is shameful that the leadership of  PEN America has learned nothing.